


we'll all arrive in heaven alive

by Hyb



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Character Development, M/M, POV Alternating, potential fandom uproar, smut and thangs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-23 04:48:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3755080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Lori lives.</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	we'll all arrive in heaven alive

**Author's Note:**

> the story I never imagined I'd actually write, owing entirely to thelongcon's ficlet [The White Dress](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1748678), which will stomp on your heart in the prettiest way.
> 
> if the alternating pov throws you off, look for the - - - which indicates a shift in perspective

The winter road winds in circles. Months pass out in the cold, the frigid rain.

Every time Rick looks at Lori she's behind glass, obscured. The less he speaks, the more silence locks his jaw. Lori's belly swells into a bomb. Ticking, they can't hold back a single day and they have no shelter.

Daryl moves in silence, he finds. Sometimes it's the closest thing to peace Rick can steal. Prowling through trees on the hunt, shadowing Daryl's silent cat steps. Daryl is a taut arc of sinew. He could survive on his own, easy. His unflinching regard makes Rick believe, for a few seconds at a time, that he can be the man these people need. 

 

\- - -

 

The first time Lori met Rick, they vomited on each other.

Her eyeballs were swimming in vodka burn, she tripped twice stumbling up the stairs. Crashed her way into the bathroom to a boy hunched over the toilet. She shoved her palm into his face but she couldn't budge his dead weight. His eyelids flickered heavy, and she threw up as much acid on his hand as in the basin.

His eyes snapped open to half mast, then. His shoulders hitched, and he coughed a weak stream over her forearm, her tennis bracelet. Her last thought, clarity aching hollow as her gut, was that the pretty girls from her sorority might not be her friends.

They woke up with their backs barricading the door shut. He was drooling on her shoulder, little kitten snores, until she shrugged him off. Once he blinked into understanding, he laughed, biting his lip.

Just not how I thought I'd spend the night with a pretty girl, he said. Eyes wide, so blue and guileless she couldn't hate him for it. For how he could just leave, while she had to jimmy open the window and skin her knees scrambling down the drainpipe. 

A week later, he showed up for her pre-cal tutoring. Apologized so many times the word ran into a nonsense slur.

Earnest, she thought, a painted boy and not a real one. Or good at pretending. The boy she reconstructed from memory had bragged to a dozen friends. How some sloppy drunk girl fell into his lap. He could fabricate an entire bacchanal in that bathroom, ruin her if he wanted. If it made him feel important.

The Rick Grimes she met smiled like a little boy. Thought she and her math were amazing. He wanted to know about her family, her favorite book, movie, color. Did she want to come to a baseball game?

She hadn't learned yet how open could be another kind of closed. How a bright window could guard so many secrets.

 

\- - -

 

They were saving up for the wedding when an orthodontist ran Lori's parents off the road. Three times the legal limit, his Cadillac a missile.

Rick didn't need asking to be Lori's anchor. He gathered her up to sob into his shirt, her bird bones shaking. Held her until she could arrange her face for the outside. She sat up at the kitchen table, pale and red eyed, balancing the books with her uncle. Funeral arrangements, the notices. Relatives to call, the house to sell. Calling up the airline for her baby sister's flight home from Texas. Rick made franks and beans, macaroni, cold cuts and sliced tomatoes. Took the phone out of her hands until she ate, or she'd fade away.

The spring wedding on a lake never came. Papers at city hall, stepping out into the afternoon glare as new minted partners. A week in the mountains for a honeymoon. Fog-wreathed dawn and black tar coffee. Making love under stars and waking to joints popping stiff in the chill. 

The memory seems further than ever, Rick thinks. How once he thought a ring could fix everything.

Hemmed in by walkers, chasing Andrew down with klaxons in their ears. He doesn't even know the baby is coming until it's over. T-Dog and Carol lost. Maggie pulled the baby free, they tell him, Hershel leaning over her shoulder. He sewed the incisions up tight. Rick meets his daughter swaddled in Carl's arms. Lori is unconscious, Beth translucent pale, an IV transfusing red between them.

Lori's bandaged and dosed, out cold. Daryl and Maggie brave the first run for formula, diapers, whatever they can scrounge. Days pass and Lori fades in and out. When her milk comes in Rick sits up behind her. The hungry knobs of her spine flush to his chest. He cups her breast to the baby's mouth, staring at his rough brown hand against all that smooth skin. Awe and fear, when you make a life. You can never belong to only yourself again.

Returned to them alive, Carol sleeps on the top bunk and Rick trades her in shifts. Feed, burp, change, repeat. 

One gray morning Lori is sitting up against a wadded coat. She must be skimping on the painkillers because her brow is clammy and her eyes sharp.

“Carl likes Judith,” she says over the baby in her arms. Rick nods. Any name will do. Wonder is humming under his skin, the first budding hope that they can make this right again.

“I accept that I live in a world where my son has to carry a gun. That I can't keep teaching him long division like he's going to fall behind in school,” Lori tells him. He wants to shake her, unduly. One day, can't she give him one damn day to be grateful? “Judith will know how to hold a knife before she learns to read,” she adds. Looks up, and Rick recoils inside his skin.

“I don't want to be married anymore,” she says. “I don't need a husband. I didn't ask to be your burden.”

“Think you'd be alive on your own?” he says, too soft.

“I need a partner, I do.” Near shaking but she doesn't look away. She lifts her chin high. “Is this how you want to raise our children? Resenting each other?”

“That sounds like your problem. Not mine." The rage hasn't reached the surface yet, the tide swelling.

Lori scrapes a hand back through her hair. Loses the conversation, looking down to Judith, the immaculate rosy curve of her cheek. “We both fell out of love a long time ago,” she murmurs. “You don't have to forgive me.”

“I already forgave you,” he snaps.

“No,” she says. Immovable. “You tried. But you couldn't.”

Rick leaves. Eats up the ground until his legs burn, and keeps going.

 

\- - -

 

“Did I make you that unhappy?” he asks.

Lori lifts her heavy head. A glance finds Judith sleeping untroubled in her mail crate. Singing Lyle Lovett used to send Carl right off, but she's found Bonnie Raitt is Judith's gal. Rick is waiting, an anxious shadow over the bed.

“I felt alone.” Careful with her words, turning them over. It's the first Rick has spoken to her in five days, and Lori's learned not to trust her own mouth. Fear, anger, make her vicious in ways she doesn't recognize. “A bit of you, a lot of me. You were alone, too.” He hasn't stormed off yet. Holding her breath, she reaches out to clasp his fingertips. 

“I asked myself, how can I love somebody this much and not be in love?” Her voice comes out watery, bleeding hormones. “I swear, I don't ever want you to stop seeing yourself the way I see you.”

Rick leans his weight into his heels. Faraway, times like this he's an island. “Way you saw me after Shane?” he rasps.

“I didn't want you to _become_ him,” she presses. “You're not your father.”

It's not enough. Rick steps away and she cuffs a hand over his wrist. Too fast, her stitches pull and she bites off a yelp. 

“Carl never should've been there,” she swears. “But it wasn't just you I was angry with. You don't know, I should have- I knew what Shane was, what he was becoming, and I didn't want to believe it. That morning at the CDC. You saw the scratches.”

Clear as a bolt it hits him. Rick's knees buckle. On the floor, he's stricken silent.

“I stopped him,” she says quickly. Humiliation creeps hot up her neck. “And I thought I did the right thing. Not setting you two at odds. I thought he'd be himself again, and you'd need him.”

This isn't what she wants. The weight dragging Rick down, more guilt to swallow.

“You carried us,” she whispers, blinking her eyes dry. “We're here because of you. Our children are safe. But you never asked for this, I know. Honey, I know. It's time to share the load.”

 

\- - -

 

Rick turns heel into their barred dining hall and finds Daryl holding his daughter. Tilting up a bottle and murmuring sweet. Disoriented, his steps peter into stillness. There was never time to wonder who Daryl might have been, if he and Rick lived each other's lives. A father, maybe. A husband. 

Lori is spooning out oatmeal. Axel's smitten, casting eyes at her over his bowl. 

“Thank you, ma'am,” he simpers.

“It's oatmeal,” she says, dry.

“For letting us stay here, I mean.” Axel looks primed to twirl his mustache and tap dance for her approval.

Lori glaces up with her spoon raised, brow arch and unimpressed. “Don't thank me,” she says. “I told him to cut you loose or kill you.”

Axel deflates, and Rick fights down the unkind twitch of his grin. Daryl snorts, doesn't bother to hide it. And he snares Rick from under his lashes like the secret is theirs to share.

Lori's started wearing her ring on a chain beneath her shirt. Quiet and unremarked. Rick wouldn't take his off at first, mulish. Finally he shifted it to his right hand. In the heat the finger swells, the ring a vise. He has to slink to Lori. She eases it free with corn oil, laughing at him behind lips pursed tight. Just a lion with a thorn in his paw, she teases. It's easy, this. Easy in ways he thought forgotten. By the time the ring slides off he's grinning as well.

“You should give it to Carl,” she says. Folds his fingers over the band. “For his future.”

 

\- - -

 

Maggie and Glenn scavenge up the highway. They bring back canned tomatoes, ibuprofen, and a limping woman drenched in walker reek. Michonne is a rope, nothing to spare, no softness to plead for their help. Hershel stitches her up and within days she's gone, slunk out like a stray. 

They have bigger problems. Their new arrivals are settling in their block. Tyreese is huge and conciliatory, Allen struck dumb mourning his wife. And Lori catches something in Sasha's eye. A fleeting shadow has her snatching the woman by the wrist, pitiless grinding of bones. Lori knows a guilty conscience. All you have to do is press.

Allen and Ben have stolen guns but they don't count on being seized in their sleep. Bound at the gates awaiting judgment, knees in the dirt and bags over their heads. Rick is livid, and well to be. Lori flattens a palm over his shoulder. Reminds him that they don't have to kill people in cold blood, not with walls to keep them safe. Locks and bars between them and danger. All of them, a family, against two scared fools. 

Lori isn't furious until Michonne rattles up in a rusted Buick. She's beaten half to a pulp. Says she tried to bring a friend back, from Woodbury, but that won't happen. Says the Governor is dangerous beyond reckoning. Lori rails at her, breathless rage. The risks, instigating, what if they followed her back to the prison? 

Lori doesn't know then that the danger is breathing down their necks. Not until she's out in the sun with Judith on her hip, and a truck crashes their gate. Walkers disgorged, the yard overrun in seconds. Lori fires every round in her revolver while her daughter wails.

In the end, the Governor slaughters his own people and leaves them rotting in the road. A woman, Karen, staggers to the prison gate in bloodied hysterics. They find Allen and Ben in the carnage and they know. Axel is dead, and wouldn't he be alive if Lori had let Rick put down the threat?

In Woodbury they find children, the frail, frightened people cowering. They bring a bus of desperate refugees, and Lori tries not to imagine a Trojan horse. 

They bear bodies wrapped in sheets. Merle, skin gray, blood on his mouth. Andrea, a bullet between her eyes, the meat of her calf chewed away. Lori washes her face and hands before they bury her. Brushes out her gold hair over the ragged exit wound. Michonne watches, and her weeping is silent, a river pouring forth. There are no accusations to make, not now. Andrea so close all this while. Michonne sharing a roof with people who would have fought to steal their friend back. It's too late to blame each other for how things could have been.

 

 

Michonne and Daryl search for the Governor. More futile as the months drag on, as winter sets in. There are no trails to follow, no bloody rumors drifting on the wind. Michonne goes taut if she stays behind the fences too long.

Lori bathes Judith in a shallow basin, looks up to the shadow that falls across her sight. Michonne is watching, carved features staid. Lori knows masks, how they sit ill and slip without warning. 

“I heard you're a hard case,” Michonne says, opaque.

Lori almost asks, who said that? Only a reflex. Making herself care is too hard, the ghost of outrage. Sense memory flashes. Childhood, pulling the legs off spiders. Feeling nothing, dull bored fascination. Too late the tenderness wells up, wretched guilty lump in your throat. You can't put it back together. 

“I'm mean, angry and selfish. Probably a bitch more days than I'm not,” Lori answers tartly, tugging Judith's fist from her hair. “I don't need anybody explaining me away.”

 

 

Glenn and Maggie are married. A promise is all it takes, all that ritual distilled down to faith. Lori thinks maybe it's better. This ruined world, new world. What they make of it.

People never cease to surprise her. She's seen Daryl Dixon bloody bandaged and cursing. Shyly tender, scooping up her daughter like a treasure. Lori's seen him spit venom like a little boy but he's a different kind of young around Rick. He seeks Rick out like his center of gravity, the one true north. Everyone changes. Lori knows the weight of a semi-automatic against her shoulder now. How it jars you down to the bone. You wake up bruised, knitting together in new and unfamiliar ways.

Months pass. Daryl doesn't talk about revenge. He walks lighter and he brings new people to their shelter, seeming baffled by their gratitude. Some mornings, Lori glimpses his shadow at Merle's grave. Whatever solace he's found, it's quiet. Acceptance maybe, a gift Lori's come to envy.

Michonne still slips away in the winter months, and in the spring bloom. She comes back with sweet mint on her breath. Smuggles comic books for Carl. Chocolate appears unbidden in Lori's cell, tucked under her pillow. It's never acknowledged, never quite seems real. Michonne can stand idle and disinterested while Lori nibbles a Toblerone. One wedge at a time, making it last. Never a glimmer of recognition.

They clear a field in winter, plant their seeds and hope. Judith crawls over Carl's lap in the shade. Lori and Rick have dirt under their nails, guns snug on their hips, a quiet shared peace. It takes a long while to catch Rick watching Daryl from afar. Distant, his lips parted on a word he can't find.

“He's a good man,” she says, and Rick blinks like he's sun dazzled.

“Sure enough,” he nods. Wipes his brow on a sleeve, smudging a new pattern in the grime. “Didn't think that was a question.”

“Neither one of us imagined what kind of man Daryl was when we met him,” she murmurs. “He'd follow you anywhere. What are you waiting for, permission?” She snags the bandanna from her back pocket and scours the dirt from his brow, staring him to silence. 

“Make it a favor to me, will you? Do what _you_ want, Rick. Just this once.”

 

\- - -

 

“We're running short on food again already,” Glenn says, flipping through the inventory. Creamed corn, dry rice, beans, they all go so quick. “Think any of these kids have tapeworm? Man, we need a system.” 

“Lori should do it,” Rick says, tearing his gaze from the window. Daryl is a silhouette up in the guard tower, rifle ready against the railing. It's stifling warm in the library, Hershel starting to nod off. Council meetings are a far cry from how they came to this place. “You should've seen her calculus. Wow-ee.”

Glenn and Sasha exchange an eloquent glance that might read _our fearless leader is too embarrassing to live_.

“Numbers are easy,” Lori objects, pink and pleased. Rick spies her pen scrawling notes already. “People are hard.”

Afternoon shades to evening. Daryl is bare assed against a desk, sweat gathering in the molten space between his legs. Rick loves the devouring stretch of his jaw around dick, forcing him open. Breathing shallow through his nose. The ache will stay with him, he'll feel it when he looks at Daryl over dinner. 

Daryl's never asked _why_ , or questioned what this is between them. Not even the first time Rick cupped his cheek and waited. Daryl looks concussed when Rick reaches out to touch him, each and every time. But he's learning how to demand. If Rick is patient, Daryl will buck into his throat. Fist a hand in his hair and fuck him hoarse.

After, he'll turn to wonder. Trace Rick's swollen mouth, or kiss his chest and belly for an eternity before sucking him off in turn. Rick's seen Daryl sleep curled in on himself. Air flooding his lungs and hushing out. Rick would be as needed as that breath, if he could.

Just now, Rick pulls off and skates his palms up Daryl's twitching thighs.

“You thought any more about the council? We'd be better with you.”

“What kinda cocksucker are you?” Daryl pants, narrowing his eyes. Rick catches the slick crown between his lips and waits until Daryl swears, shivers.

“I'll come to your boring ass meetings, you corrupt sonbitch,” Daryl spits at him. He claws Rick's shoulder at his answering hum of approval, leaking salt over his tongue. 

Patience, until he's dizzy. The sips of air aren't sustaining him and Rick goes dim at the edges. Daryl cups his skull at last, moan cracking his chest when Rick opens his throat. Maybe it was like starlight, he thinks, hazy. The echoes of his marriage. Seeing what was long cold from a distance. Imagining there was anything left to save. 

Under his hands, Daryl is fire.

 

\- - -

 

When they feel at peace, death slips quiet inside their walls. They wake to screams. Lori drives a knife through the eye of a man she knew only yesterday, Judith whimpering behind her. 

So many die, but her children are healthy. Daryl brings them to see her through glass. Carl won't cry, tells her she'll be fine as soon as they get medicine. He has a father to teach him hope. It's a kindness in this world. 

She swears to the void, I can bear this. If this is the deal, I'm saying yes. Take me so long as my family is safe. I haven't asked for much, have I. Just give me this. 

Blood rattles in her lungs. Concrete cool at their backs, she tucks Lizzie against her side. Tells stories to drown out the fear. Snow White, she's only sleeping. The velveteen rabbit, they thought he burned. But he woke up and he was finally real. Nobody's ever really gone, she swears.

 

 

The prison falls. Lori dreams the phantom suckling of her daughter. She wakes clawing her own throat, Rick's hand clapped over her scream. 

It's the cruelest joke, that your children are safe inside you until they aren't. You can never be their shelter again.

Cruel like all luck is cruel. She and Rick escape out a window to Carl and Michonne, only for revenge to follow them. Her son cries out in the dirt and this snake oil predator has Lori's arms pinned down by her sides. Guns on Michonne, Rick. Daryl bent under fists and rifle butts. Lori can feel the blood beating hot where the man calling himself Joe cut her cheek, and laughed.

Her son is screaming and Lori bites down. Skin rips under her teeth, the rubber tug of veins. Hot copper splashes the back of her throat. It's not _enough_. Joe's hold on her falters, and she drives her knife deep into the soft flesh beneath his jaw. Twists, saws against grating bone, until he topples at her feet. 

The filth pinning her boy down recoils. Pleads until Rick guts him. Lori turns Carl's eyes into her shoulder so he doesn't see her face. The mask of blood, the monstrous satisfaction.

After Joe, she goes quiet. Excuses herself over Rick's protests, his reaching hands of comfort. She vomits into a bush out of sight, keeps retching dry. Doesn't hear Michonne coming. Flinches when her hair is stroked back from her face. Michonne's bare palm is cool as rain over her brow. 

Lori chokes out another weak stream of bile, narrowly missing Michonne's boots. She laughs, when it comes to her. An ugly sound, brutalized.

“What's so funny?” Michonne says, patient with her hysteria.

Lori is hollow but she can't stop laughing. Vodka shots and skinned knees. “Nothing,” she rasps. “I was just remembering.”

They find no reprieve in Terminus. 

Lori sharpens her belt buckle into a gouge. Later they can marvel that Glenn and Maggie are alive, Oscar, Sasha and Bob. New faces she doesn't care to learn. The mullet in the corner keeps trying to assure them of the cure waiting. The grand design. How they'll carry themselves out of this place for all humankind.

Lori steps toe to toe and snarls in his face. “What's your cure to me? Will it make anyone _alive_ again? The friends we've buried? Will it feed my son? The world _ended_. You can't cure what's in people and my family won't be your cannon fodder. Now shut. Up. And make yourself a weapon.”

Eugene shuts up.

She never does think to apologize. Not even in the church, where she ought to seek penance. Judith returned, whole and beautiful. Lori ought to be humbled, but she wasn't wrong, only spiteful. And spite seems small compared to evil. 

Lori falls asleep watching the moon through a window. When she closes her eyes it transmutes. Hershel's farm, that storybook house shimmering in the afternoon haze like sugar dissolving. Only ever a mirage, living like before.

In the dark of the chapel she hacks a man's skull to pulp, and she doesn't feel a thing. 

 

 

In Virginia they run out of water. Oscar tucks Judith against his chest, trying to soothe her with his baritone hum.

They all slump together in the road, the dead heat. Michonne has found some vestige of calm in herself. One elegant wrist traces a twig through the dirt with impossible grace. Drawing, Lori thinks after a dull pause.

“What is that?” she asks, too tired to sit up straight. If she and Rick weren't collapsed back to back, they'd topple. Carl dozes with his head in her lap, he won't complain.

“Hold still,” Michonne says firmly. Glances up, intent. “I'm trying to get the eyes right.”

 

\- - -

 

Judith coos over applesauce, and Lori checks Aaron's bindings. Rick hovers at the door, wary eye on the horizon. Lori and Michonne, they've voted to see what happens. Daryl wasn't shouting to the contrary, either.

Aaron tells them they're not bad people.

“If they're not back in thirty-eight minutes,” Rick says without bothering to look, “I'll put a knife through the base of your skull.”

Aaron turns his wide, beseeching eyes on Lori. She's radiant as Rick knew her at nineteen. The scar healing vicious across her cheek can't steal that.

“He will,” she promises. “And I'll hold you down while he does it.”

 

\- - -

 

The gates open and the sun shines brighter.

Lori curls one hand on her revolver and one on her son's shoulder. Breathes in and the air is clean, free of rot. There are fruit trees, fresh painted houses, curtains fluttering in open windows. 

She flanks Rick easy as a thought, their children between them. Daryl and Michonne guard their shadows a pace behind. The angels over their shoulders, the mercy they had no right to expect. Once they were all frightened, they were unsure. Now the changes have been wrought. They've all burned down to base metal, and there's nothing left of them to hurt.

Lori thinks, this place is weak. One guard at the gate, open streets. Unprepared. We won't leave. We can take it. This Eden, it's ours now. We won't be cast out. 

 

\- - -

 

Dawn shadows the prison's towers and Daryl catches Rick coming around the pig pen. Kisses him goodbye faint and fleeting, warmth that seeps through Rick's skin. 

Maybe it was always going to unfold this way. Rick broke down the wall but Daryl slipped past his defenses quiet, with no shots fired. A kiss like that is a promise. He watches Daryl's motorcycle peel out of the gate. Unbidden, he pictures the map of fingerprints under Daryl's clothes. A warning to the world. What Rick cherishes, he won't ever let go. 

Must stare too long, the bike long vanished over the horizon. The engine's rattle fades amid the cicada hum. Lori is laughing at him, clumsy as bells cascading. He thinks how many years have passed since she laughed like that. 

They fit together, his arm draped over her shoulders. Her hip tucked into his side. All the spaces they've carved for each other. Slow as rain etching the Grand Canyon. In gentleness and in storms of thunder.

“Yeah, laugh it up,” he grins against her hair. “That's right. Nobody knows me like you do.”

.

.

.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> title via The National. in addition, the real soul of this story comes from [Nothing Else](https://soundcloud.com/bridge-19-1/nothing-else) by Bridge 19. they're a Louisville band and so I am morally obligated to boost them whenever possible.
> 
> if you'd like to keep reading, you can jump to the canon verse [Chapel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3627438) and the two-part [a home at the end of the world](http://archiveofourown.org/series/240725) series. 
> 
> you can also find me on [tumblr](http://h-yb.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> AND if you feel so moved, feedback and concrit are a joy. to everyone who has engaged in the past, you're spectacular and I appreciate you more than you know.


End file.
